Were you ever driving down the road and see one of those mobile phone towers disguised as a pine tree? If you have, then it probably wasn’t executed very well. The pine tree tower is a great innovation but is rarely utilized in the way it was intended to be. Here’s an example of a pine tree tower, properly placed:
Can you see it? It’s right there in the center of the picture. Click the pic and you can visit a photograph I’ve edited to show the tower’s location. Here’s a zoom of the same tower, from the same location, taken with the same camera:
There are several other pictures in this batch, if you’d like to see them, click here.
Now the majority of pine tree mobile phone towers are built in surroundings where they don’t exactly blend. See if you can spot the tower in the following picture:
No little red circle required here. The tower stands out like a sore thumb. It may well be that the cell company that installed this tower needed the extra height to saturate the area, but if a tower is going to stand out, why try to disguise it? Does anyone really drive by this and say, “Wow, that’s a really tall pine tree?” No, more likely they say: “There’s one of those pine tree cell phone towers.”
A lot of companies are doing a great job disguising their towers in areas where the population is opposed to aesthetically disturbing their environment. Some use these towers to pacify a population which has gotten riled up because of the tower being put in in the first place, and they install them without any real effort to disguise the tower.
At the same time, a lot of those same people who don’t want the tower obstructing their views want improved service. They complain about a lack of coverage to the right people, who give them the service they request, only to have the same people whine about the tower location or aesthetics. For these people I have the following message: Get over it. If you want coverage, you must have towers, as physically unappealing as they may be. Cell phone towers don’t operate at 100k watts like radio or television stations, they run at closer to 200 watts on the high end. So you have to have more towers to fill in gaps, because the towers won’t cover as broad an area as a TV tower will.
Here’s an idea: Try to look at a tower as a utility, like a water tower or a TV antenna. It has to be there for your phone to work, so just try to live with it.
Bad Cell | A Mobile Lifestyle Weblog 